Stu Hamm
Bassist Stu Hamm has just released a new album titled "The Diary of Partick Xavier." Stu explains the concept behind the name. "In 2015 I decided to take a year off and travel, and try to answer those existential questions. I found a diary in a hotel that was written by an English dude who had gone on a same sort of journey, and had written a diary about it. It turned out that we had actually been to some of the same places. I thought it would be a great idea to write a solo bass record about our shared experiences and our soul searching journey." Having just completed a winter/early spring tour, Stu will continue touring and supporting the new album throughout 2018.
Stu comes from a musical family and became a proficient bass player by the time he finished grade school. Moving on to Berklee School of Music in Boston to continue his education, he befriended Steve Vai there and would eventually be asked to play on Steve's Flex-Able album. After paying his gigging and touring dues by playing with a diverse group of performers like an Elvis impersonator and other contacts he made at Berklee, Stu would eventually work with Joe Satriani for an extended period of time. While gaining this valuable experience, he would use the bass as a lead instrument by developing his two handed method to play counter melodies on the bass. I spoke to Stu on the last night of his early 2018 tour, about his new album and his thriving career.
R.V.B. - Hey Stu, Rob von Bernewitz from Long Island... how are you?
S.H. - Hi Rob... what's up?
R.V.B. - You're on your last show of your tour tonight?
S.H. - That's right. I'm staying in Buffalo but I've got an early flight tomorrow morning. I'm driving up to Toronto and heading right back after the gig... sleeping for a couple of hours and then heading to the airport.
R.V.B. - Where do you hang your hat?
S.H. - I'm in LA. I'll be in LA for about 30 hours before I get in another plane. I'm taking four flights to go to Reunion Island, which is off the coast of Madagascar.
R.V.B. - That sounds like fun.
S.H. - It will be. I'm appearing at a guitar festival. I'm playing with Guthrie Govan and a few other people. It should be super fun.
R.V.B. - How did your latest tour go?
S.H. - At the end of the day it was incredible. It was hard... it was challenging... it was rewarding. It's a difficult sell doing this solo bass, storyteller thing. It's hard for club owners and people coming to shows to imagine how it could be interesting. But the people who showed up loved it. Every now and then you had to book the gig on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. It was great. I was a bunch of old fans and made a bunch of new fans.
R.V.B. - Is tonight a storyteller show or a clinic?
S.H. - It's both. I'm gonna get there and meet a few friends. I'll do about an hour and a half clinic and then do a show.
R.V.B. - You have a new CD out "The Diary of Patrick Xavier"... how did you come up with that name?
S.H. - Every record that I write... every song that I write is about something. Maybe a book I read... a trip I took or a person I met. It's not just a collection of riffs. No one ever asks me what the songs are about, they ask me about what scales I use, what technique I use or some other bullshit. In 2015 I decided to take a year off and travel, and try to answer those existential questions. I was going to keep a journal and maybe write some music about it. I found a diary in a hotel that was written by an English dude who had gone on a same sort of journey, and had written a diary about it. It turned out that we had actually been to some of the same places. I thought it would be a great idea to write a solo bass record about our shared experiences and our soul searching journey. Of course, I changed the guys name to Patrick Xavier.
S.H. - What do you call a US citizen that moves to another country?
R.V.B. - An immigrant?
S.H. - An Expat. (Patriot) Like Patrick Xavier. Patrick's playing everything.
R.V.B. - Interesting. So musical instruments - you played a lot of different instruments early on - did you start with the piano?
S.H. - Yeah. My whole family is musicians and educators. I got a drum kit for Christmas when I was four years old. Then I played piano at a very early age. Played flute... trumpet... and a bunch of different instruments. As soon as I picked up a bass I just fell in love with it. I got a lot of encouragement and I was pretty good at it... at a very early age. At the age of 16, I knew that it was what I wanted to do. On this tour, I met a guy from high school who was in the jazz band. He gave me a tape of me playing when I was 15. I was pretty good man!!! I tell you what.
R.V.B. - (Hahah) You know what they say with a bass player... Why does a bass player only take one lesson? Because the next day he has a gig. (Hahaha)
S.H. - Of course (Haha)
R.V.B. - They're in such demand. How did you enjoy your years at Berklee? What were some of the standout moments?
S.H. - Berklee was great. I grew up mostly in Illinois, then I moved to a small town in Vermont, so I was up in the sticks... then going to the big city of Boston. The best thing was meeting musicians from around the world. Great bass players like Baron Browne, Victor Bailey, Tim Archibald, Jim Landers and Wayne Pedzwater. They were incredible musicians. They were playing every night Mike Stern, Jeff Berlin... That's when I met Steve Vai. We had a band called Morning Thunder. I played on the tapes that he sent to get the gig with Zappa. The rest is history.
R.V.B. - Things happened pretty Quickly for you there. You had a good background before you even got there.
S.H. - In Illinois, when I was playing in the high school stage band, it was pretty serious stuff. When I listened to the copies of recordings of it, it was very high quality. Then when I moved to Vermont, I went to a really small school. I started gigging. I was playing with frat bands in junior high school. I was playing in top 40 bands at ski resorts and doing some jazz gigs. I had all the music theory stuff, so when I got to Berklee I was pretty well prepared. It was a very different school then. It didn't have the resources that it does now... or the enrollment. Back in my day, if you stayed at Berklee for all four years, you weren't much of a player. The idea was to go there, meet people, get snapped up and start gigging.
R.V.B. - What did you do after your time with Steve Vai?
S.H. - He left after one year at Berklee and moved to California to become Frank Zappa's transcriber. For about a year, I went out on the road with an Elvis Presley impersonator. It was during the height of the disco era. We would do like three disco sets a night and two Elvis shows. After a year, I moved back to Boston. Then I went to Germany. I spent about a half a year there with a drummer - an ex-roomate - I met at Berklee. Then Steve called me and got me an audition with Zappa. I flew out to audition - that's a long story. About a year later, Steve called me up - when I was living in Boston - and said that he wanted me to do this record. He wanted me to come to LA to record it. So I got on a bus from Boston to LA - slept on Steve's couch - and recorded Flex-Able.
R.V.B. - Did you wind up staying there?
S.H. - That's when I moved to LA and I've been in California ever since.
R.V.B. - In your youth, was there any particular rock music or classical music that you liked?
S.H. - My father was a composer. One of his friends was John Cage - the avant garde composer - so I was exposed to some pretty avand garde classical and jazz... experimental jazz music. I was exposed to opera... I was playing in the symphony. All kinds of stuff... pop music. I distinctly remember hearing Roundabout on the radio... the long version where it got really quiet and they came back in with the organ solo and that great bass line. I jumped on my stingray and rode to the K-Mart music department and used my lawn mowing money to buy Fragile. I saw Chris Squire wearing a cape and playing his Rickenbacher and thought it was the coolest thing I ever saw in my whole life. That's when I decided I wanted to be a bass player forever.
R.V.B. - What was your first bass and how did your gear change through the years.
S.H. - I got my first bass for Christmas in 1973. It was by a company called Alvarez... I peeked into my parents closet. It was a red SG copy. I had been using the bass at the school. My parents found out very quickly that I had an aptitude for the bass. In 75, my parents bought me a blonde post CBS Fender jazz bass with a three bolt on neck... I loved it.
R.V.B. - What kind of amplifiers were you using?
S.H. - Very early on I was using Peavey stuff... A Peavey Century. Really early on I had a solid state amp. Peavey had made one of the first solid state amps. Then when I was with Fender, I had them develop a solid state amp. I had my first EMG's put in my Fender Jazz bass in 1979. I've been playing with active electronics ever since. I'm just so fortunate. I was good friends with Rob Turner, who is President and owner on EMG pickups. I know all the guys at Fender and GHS strings. I'm friends with Stanley Clarke. I got to know Chris Squire a bit. All my childhood hero's wound up being peers and friends of mine.
R.V.B. - I see that you were involved with the BX3 project, with Jeff Berlin and Billy Sheehan.
S.H. - Oh yeah!! I used to stalk Jeff Berlin all the time in Boston. I used to go to all of his gigs. My first day in Boston, he was playing, and I showed up early and had him autograph my Patrick Moraz album. It's great man... to be in the same conversation that I grew up admiring... pretty crazy.
R.V.B. - That's a lot of bass talent on one tour. Your two handed method of playing... how long did it take you do develop it? Was it experimental at first and developed as you continued learning?
S.H. - The bass has changed so much in my lifetime. When I was a kid, I think three people slapped on the bass. No one tapped on it, no one played harmonics on it. Chris squire played chords. Then Jaco came along and changed the game for everybody. On November 8th 1978, I saw Weather Report at the Orpheum Theater in Boston. I never treated the bass as a solo instrument, but after seeing Jaco Pistorius, the games a foot. I tried to work on a bunch of my piano pieces that I played as a kid and ran out of fingers. When I was playing with Steve, we were doing some Van Halen stuff... a lot of hammer on's. With a hammer on, your sort of tapping down on the string. So you're using two hands. It you tap down on the strings you can do different things. Through the process of working out some of my piano repertoire, like Bach's Prelude in C... Gershwin's Prelude No. 2, the technique sort of invented itself. I didn't really invent it but I was one of the first guys. When I first discovered the idea of one hand doing one thing and the other hand doing another by tapping down, the only other guys that were doing it were Billy, and he was doing it in a much more guitar sort of way... and Stanley Jordan. At that point, I learned bass by ripping off bass lines by John Entwistle, Chris Squire, Stanley Clarke and Paul McCartney. I didn't check out what Billy was doing and wanted to come up with my own thing about it. Now everyone plays that way. Now if a bass player is 15 years old, they're expected to slap, pop, tap, play harmonics, chords and no one did that when I was a kid.
R.V.B. - It's interesting how it evolved. Music is an ever changing medium. In your touring days, were there any shows that really stick out in your mind... that gave you a real wow moment?
S.H. - I've had so many of them. I remember playing the Wiltern Theater in LA, for the first time with Joe. Stanley Clarke came down to check me out. I got to meet him. I haven't been lucky, I've been fortunate. I worked really hard to get where I am... a lot of hard work and concentration. There's just so many of them... like last night. It's a Tuesday night in Buffalo and I'm so tired. I've had 20 shows in 30 days. I've been doing good and it's towards the end of the tour, and the day before I had the night off. I drove like six hours and got to the hotel on Monday night and I realized that my whole body, and brain, was just so tired. I pulled up to this club that I never played - in Buffalo - and I didn't know what to expect. It was crappy out and a cold night in Buffalo, and it was like the best crowd I had on the whole tour. There was standing ovations. They stood up for the National anthem. I sold a ton of CD's... it was just great man. When you least expect it and something like that happens, it makes you happy to be alive.
R.V.B. - Your last show was memorable... that's awesome. Were you in danger with any of those fires that were going on in California?
S.H. - There was one that was called the "Creek fire." It was right by my house. I live on Foothill Boulevard. The north side of Foothill Boulevard was mandatory evacuation. For about three days I had my car packed and ready to go. My daughter goes to college in Santa Barbara and 101 was closed for about two weeks. I couldn't really get up to see her. It's scary stuff man.
R.V.B. - I could imagine. Congratulations on your tour... congratulations on your new album and have a lot of fun in Madagascar.
S.H. - Hahaha. I will man. I'll be looking forward to the flight. I'm going to download some books and sleep. Thanks for taking time to talk.
R.V.B. - You never know. If you download some books you may come up with some ideas for your next album.
S.H. - That's the idea. I've already got some cooking. Have a good day Rob.
Interview conducted by Robert von Bernewitz
This interview may not be reproduced in any part or form without permission from this site.
For more information on Stu Hamm visit his Favebook page Stu Hamm
Special thanks to Billy James at Glass Onyon Promotions
For more information on this site contact Robvonb247(at)gmail(dot)com
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